Fantasy Islands

Two postcard-perfect Danish islands may finally be making eco-warrior dreams a sustainable reality.

Story and Photos by Chris Turner

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These are good times for Jørgen Tranberg, an independent farmer on the tiny Danish island of Samsø. Still sturdy and fair-haired in his 50s, Tranberg makes for a gruffly congenial guide as he shows me around his farm, punctuating his thickly accented English with rhetorical bursts of “yes, yes?” His 130 head of cattle produce milk for a farmer-owned co-operative on the mainland. (“Here is where they’re feeding, yes, yes?”) He also grows potatoes – historically Samsø’s most famous crop – along with organic onions and a small patch of pumpkins.

It’s his newest cash cow, however, that allowed Tranberg to outfit the kitchen in his traditional half-timbered farmhouse with state-of-the-art stainless-steel appliances. We hop in his tractor and drive out past the cow pasture and onion field to take a closer look, arriving at the base of a slim white tower 50 metres tall, crowned with a three-bladed rotor that whirs in the stiff breeze. This is the combination scythe and silo with which Tranberg harvests his other crop. More precisely, it is a one-megawatt wind turbine, and Jørgen Tranberg is a wind farmer.

Tranberg trots ahead and throws open the door at the base of the tower. “We go to the top, yes, yes?” He ducks inside, removes a control panel the size of a laptop, hits a button and 20 seconds later the turbine’s giant blades have stopped. In the bullet-shaped nook at the top, the roof opens like a two-petalled flower to reveal a vertiginous view of Samsø and the sea beyond.

To the east lie fields laced with the narrow country roads and paved pathways that make Samsø a cyclist’s paradise, ending in the mishmash of cozy beachfront cottages, thatched houses and bobbing sailboats that constitute the harbour village of Ballen. Until recently, this pastoral landscape was Samsø’s only claim to fame – farmland that yields the country’s favourite potatoes and tidy villages that provide summer getaways for the Danes. (The island is conveniently located in the middle of the channel separating the Danish mainland from the large island of Sjælland, where Copenhagen is found.)

It’s the view to the west that hints at the island’s newfound global significance. There stand seven more turbines in a neat line, spinning rapidly. These – plus about a dozen others clustered on the island and perched offshore – supply virtually all of the electricity for Samsø’s 4,230 residents, plus enough surplus power to offset the fossil fuels burned by the island’s vehicles. They’re the hallmarks of a seven-year-old effort to transform Samsø into the world’s first “renewable-energy island.” In the late 1990s, the Danish government sponsored a nationwide contest to create a showcase for its global leadership in renewable energy, and Samsø became its poster child. It amounts to possibly the most ambitious sustainability project on the planet, doubly so because the contest’s runner-up – Ærø, another small island formerly known for produce and picturesque villages, located about 100 kilometres south of Samsø – decided to go ahead with its plan, even after Samsø claimed the title.

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